Day 24 - Love interrupted

Love: As an adult adoptee what are your thoughts on marriage, love, and family? What are your thoughts on sex before marriage and common law marriage? If you're an interracial adoptee do you think it matters of your partner is the same ethnicity as you are? Have you ever been in a relationship with another adult adoptee? If yes, what was that like? Was it harder or easier than other relationships you've had? If no, would you ever consider dating another adult adoptee? Do you think it would be easier or harder?

INTERRUPTED!

Today's adoption related post on love is interrupted by the need for my Love and I to go and watch a cheesy love story.

See you tomorrow!

Old friends revisited

2 things happened yesterday that just made Liam's day.

First he saw this trailer:




Then I had to clean out the attic. 

Since our attic is really just crawl space under the eaves I often get Liam to help since he's the only one who can stand up in there.  The bribe is that he can play with some of the toys that we may find that have been boxed up and put away.

Well, the 5th box he pulled out was his Cars toys! 

Cars was the very first movie that Liam saw in the theaters, 1 month before his 4th birthday.  He sat mesmerized for the entire thing, thumb in mouth not even blinking.  He loved it so much we ended up seeing it 3 times at the theaters and were in line to buy in on DVD the day it was released.

Of course, he also had to have the toys to go with it, so that he could act out every scene as he watched.  The one toy he REALLY wanted was Mack, the 18 wheeler that hauls McQueen across the country.  So we gave him an incentive - earn $20.00 and it's yours.  He was a very highly motivated 4 year old!

It helped that Granny and Grandpa where here and kept slipping him Loonies!

But alas, little boys grow up and their interest move on to things like Star Wars, Poke'mon or Halo (not that he's allowed to see/play Halo, but he still "loves" it - go figure)

But old friends are never really gone... just packed away for awhile.  We had family movie night last night and watched Cars, while Liam revisited all of his toys.

And yes, even after the 1,345,675,123 viewing of the movie, I still shed a tear when Lightening pushed the King over the finish line! 

Be sure to mark your calendars - June 24th, 2011!

For all the marketing that Disney does...

we couldn't find the ONE Toy Story 3 toy that Liam really wanted.  So what do you do when it's one week to his birthday and you can't find it anywhere - not in stores, not even online?

You make it of course!

Well, actually Hilary made it since I don't sew.  3 peas in a pod.  I realize they had a 20 second part in the entire movie, but they are the characters that Liam fell in love with during all the pre-release teasers and 20 seconds of screen time was fine with him.  They were still his favorite after seeing the movie.  Each store that we went into that might even remotely carry Toy Story 3 toys would send him scouring every hidden corner in search of them.

But now he has them and loves it!

Movies for 1000 Alex

Or is that a 1000 movies?

We own a LOT of movies.  This next picture is of just Liam's movies that we hauled out to edit.  We only managed to cull 20 for a future garage sale and 10 to be stored in the attic.

Some people don't get the joy of watching a great movie over and over again. Ones like The Princess Bride or 12 Angry Men.  Or more recently Cars and Aliens in the Attic (Okay, I can't watch that one over and over again, but Liam sure can!)  For us watching a movie that you already know so well is like meeting an old friend.  There is comfort in the expected.  I have my go to movies when I need a good cry, when I'm feeling sick or when I feel the need to "blow shit up"

We are the people that get called when Liam's school is holding a movie club, when friends are on bed rest or in the hospital, or if you just can't find that obscure movie from your past.  Chance are we have it!

Movie "Orphan" makes me vegetarian

When the movie Orphan first came out it was talked about up and down on the adoption blogs. This post isn't going to be about the adoption angle of the movie. So many other people have said it so much better then I can, whatever their feelings on it.

This post is how watching the movie has caused me to revert to my vegetarianistic ways.

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Hilary and I are woefully behind in our grown-up movie watching. Newest Pixar, Disney or Imageworks ? You betcha we've seen it. Movies with plots, no animation and actual actors? Not so much. So when Liam went out for dinner with a friend tonight, we figured Hey! we might actually be able to watch a whole movie. Uninterrupted. With naughty scenes and grown up words even.

So we started going through the On-Demand list that our cable provider offers. The list kinda sucked. We narrowed it down to 2 - Orphan or Taking Pelham 123. Hilary wasn't in the mood for a smash'em up-blow'em up movie, so Orphan it was.

The movie was okay. It was kinda slow and since we already knew what the ending was, any suspense was sort of lost on us. But being classified as a horror movie it had it's share of creepy music, people jumping out from behind things and some guts and gore. Now I don't mind guts and gore for the most part. I'm good with real live situations involving blood and injuries, I can watch surgeries on TV without being squeamish. I just can't watch anything that I can equate back to food.

I have to confess: I have food "issues".

Can you hear Hilary laughing right now? "Issues"? She thinks that's a rather mild word to use to describe me and my food. Words that she may use include: botheration, nuisance, aggravation, annoyance, just to name a few.

Left to my own devises I would be vegetarian. Except for bacon. Or steak. Or hamburgers. The trick is that none of those food items even remotely resemble what they came from. And if I start letting myself think about where they came from and the processes to get them to my table, well then, I'm done with those too for awhile.

In our house though Hilary is the domestic goddess. She does the shopping and the cooking, so by default she plans the menu. She is very good to me though. If we are having something she knows I have "issues" with she will prepare in such a way that I can eat it. Or she'll just cut up my food for me before she serves it. That folks, is LOVE.

Anyway, back to the movie.

There is a scene that involves the rather brutal killing of a pigeon. And since it's a horror movie, they show it in all it's gory detail with a synced up squelchy soundtrack.

yeah.

We of course started watching the movie before dinner. We had planned on having sloppy joe's. Wanna know what I had for dinner? Fruit and chocolate. Hilary has kindly frozen the rest of the sloppy joe mixture for another day, long in the future, when I will have hopefully gotten these images out of my mind.

Tomorrow is New Year's eve. And since we live on the East Coast and it's currently Lobster season, guess what we will be having for dinner? And for some reason, I'm just fine with hacking crustaceans apart on my plate. As long as I'm not in the room when Hilary cooks them, she takes the feelers off for me and no bit of shell EVER gets in my mouth, then I'll have a wonderful feast.

Maybe I have more "issues" then I thought!

Happy New Year everyone!

Rear Window

There are many reasons that I don't get to see very many movies at the theater these days. The tickets are expensive, the popcorn is expensive (and yes, I HAVE to have popcorn at the movies), the baby sitter is expensive, the selection isn't always worth the money.

Gee, I think there might be a theme here.



But another BIG reason that I wait for the DVDs to come out is because I have a slight hearing loss. It's not significant enough to need hearing aides (though Hilary might disagree with that). The range of sounds that I have the hardest time hearing just happen to be the range of most people's speaking voices. Add in back ground noise and music sound tracks and I miss 1/2 of what is going on. At home I can use Closed Captioning or the wonderful sub-titles that come with most DVDs.

So I skip seeing a lot of movies at the show, which really sucks, because Hilary and I love to go to the movies. Before Liam was born we could easily see 3 movies in 1 weekend, especially once the Oscar nominations were out.

This weekend however, Liam was going to a movie birthday party to see G-Force. The timing was right that Hilary and I could see Julie and Julia at the same time. Being a foodie family we have been looking forward to this movie for a while. My concern was that I wouldn't be able to hear well enough to be able to understand Meryl Streep's British accent.

Then we hit pay dirt! Hilary stumbled across "Rear-Window Captioning"

On the way into the theater, viewers pick up a reflective plastic panel mounted on a flexible stalk. The panel sits in a seat cup holder or on the floor adjacent to the seat. A large LED display is mounted on a rear wall that displays caption characters in mirror image. Viewers move the panels into position (usually below the movie screen) so they can read the reflected captions and watch the movie. It is sometimes necessary to sit in a certain area of the theater to obtain the best angle for reflecting the backward text emitted from the back of the theater on the panel while also being able to view the movie at the same time.

BRILLIANT! The only downfall is that they only have it for 1 of the screens at our local multi-screened theater. Luckily it happend that Julie and Julia was playing there so we got to test it out. It worked like a charm.

I need to save up my pennies because I'm back in business for seeing (and understanding) movies at the theater!